Radio UserLand inspires remix artists

A recurring theme among Radio webloggers is how to take data in one form and render it in another. The software handles this task so well that it either turns people into information-remix junkies or attracts that kind of crowd. Radio supports text, HTML, XML, OPML, and RSS as input and output formats and can be extended to support others -- Atom, OCS, you name it -- with scripts written in the UserTalk language.

One such junkie, Richard MacManus, will be replacing an OPML-to-HTML transformation of his site's topic list with an XML-to-HTML conversion:

My ideal is to do the XSL transformation on the server-side, rather than the client (browser) side. The reason for this is that due to the proliferation of different browsers on the Web, it'll be a nightmare to second-guess how all of them will process the XSL transformation. Whereas with a server-side transformation, I know how my server will handle the task.

Interesting project, but as I asked him, it seems like a waste not to use Radio. UserTalk's XML verbs can read the data and render it as a static HTML page, upstreaming it automatically, leaving less for the Web server to think about.

Salon Blogs · Radio Userland · 2004/01/27 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Comments

Thanks for your suggestion, I will look into the UserTalk XML verbs. I might try both otions: Radio verbs and an XSLT using PHP. One of the other motivations for me doing this is I want to learn XSLT so I can use it in my job in future, so doing a topic-based navigation on my blog is a good way to "learn by doing".

ps I like the title "information-remix junkie". Sounds like a character in a William Gibson book :-)

#1 · Richard MacManus · 2004/01/27

#2 · Glen · 2006/06/06